Muxtape rises from ashes as a MySpace-like site for bands

The new, made-over Muxtape has launched after a nearly year-long battle …

Muxtape, the former online music mixtape/mashup service, has finally relaunched as a "legit" place for musicians to showcase their work. The new Muxtape was announced on the company's blog Tuesday afternoon with 12 of Muxtape's favorite bands and signups opening up for more bands to join in on the fun "in the near future."

Muxtape 2.0 allows bands to create their own pages and put photos, music, and links up for fans to explore. For example, Girl Talk's Muxtape page has four songs available for streaming, and Reggie Watts' Muxtape page has music, a handful of Vimeo links toward the bottom, and a brief bio. For now, that's pretty much it, though the site may eventually allow bands to sell concert tickets and offer downloads of their music.

The old Muxtape was originally launched in the spring of 2008, and took mix tapes (those of you who grew up in the 80s remember those, right?) online. Instead of recording songs off of the radio, LP (another old analog music format), and CD onto cassette tapes and giving them to the love of your life, Muxtape allowed users to upload playlists of MP3s which were then accessible to others.

But right after Muxtape 1.0 launched, observers pointed out that the RIAA would certainly be irked by the site, and they were right. Though Muxtape's operators seemed confident that something could be worked out with the RIAA, the organization managed to successfully shut Muxtape down.

In an open letter to the Muxtape community several months later, founder Justin Ouellette aired out some of the dirty laundry from the RIAA showdown. He wrote that he was actively working with bands and the RIAA to work out a legit, legal deal to keep the site going, and a number of artists were thrilled to have their music available for users to mix. Still, Ouellette claims the RIAA did nothing but try to threaten and intimidate him, and that he never had the funds to defend the legality of Muxtape in court.

It was then when Ouellette decided to just keep the site as it was originally intended offline, but relaunch it as a portal "exclusively for bands" to upload their own music and showcase it across the web. And it may well serve that purpose, though at this point, there's not a lot that differs between a Muxtape page and, say, MySpace (an extremely popular online destination for bands to put up content for fans). Without the user-generated component of Muxtape--users making their own mixes and streaming them to their friends--the original flavor of the service has been drained, and there may not be a lot of reason for regular users like you and me to go there unless the bands involved do some heavy marketing.